Nani Babaco Malia

It’s a sad day in Hirpvile, for a friend is leaving. Everyone has seen friends move away, and it’s always the same. You promise to keep in touch. There’s talk about getting together, you’ll visit them, they’ll visit you or you’ll meet up somewhere cool. And you mean it. But often life gets in the way and you don’t meet up. And the emails become less frequent, and phone calls non-existent. It’s just a sad fact of life. No one means for it to happen.

Today one of my best friends moved away. And here’s the catch, he was already living in Washington DC. So how much farther away could he go? Well, how does Kenya sound? Yes, that is far. He came to the US 10 years ago, and we met while working together at Lenscrappers 7 years ago. It didn’t take long before we had our crew. It was four Jews and a Kenyan. There was even an Easter spent at Worlds of Fun by two of the Jews and the Kenyan.

Typically people love to hear a baby laugh, but I never met a person who didn’t love this guys laugh. And sure that sounds some what gay, but so what. From the surface, it probably didn’t make sense that we became such good friends. Talk about different backgrounds. I grew up in the ‘burbs of Long Island, Connecticut and Kansas. Yet we have a lot in common. Similar sick senses of humor, we had a similar appreciation for movies. More than that, we had identical values; loyalty to friends and family, and standing up for principles.

So it’s sad that he’s going. And it wasn’t under the best of circumstances that he’s going home, so the whole situation sucks that much more. I’ve never known anyone whose been through as much and yet never made an excuse or backed down when he had every reason to. If we happen to win the World Series of Pop Culture, I fully intend on making a trip to Kenya. If we don’t, I’m still going to try and get out there some day. I just hope they have a McDonalds.